Facebook
It has undeniably been a great year for Twitter. But it's been an even better year for Facebook. From April to July, Twitter grew by 4.2 million users in the U.S. During that same period, Facebook grew by more than 20 million users. Time spent on Facebook.com exceeds Twitter.com by a factor of about 3,000. But it's Facebook's positioning beyond Twitter replication that deserves the most attention.
With Facebook Connect, Facebook is moving away from being a site and toward becoming a platform on which much of the web will run. The number of sites currently using Facebook Connect in some form is astounding.
With Facebook's expanding domain in mind, some of its other efforts take on new significance. Facebook is playing with the concept of micro-payments. It has "Pay with Facebook" services, though they are currently limited to a handful of items that can be purchased using a credit card tied to the account. It's likely that Pay with Facebook will roll out as a payment platform to sites using Facebook Connect. Facebook is also planning a roll-out of Facebook credits, currency equivalent to a mere penny, which will be leveraged in social bookmarking and sharing.
Google
Despite Facebook's smart plays that threaten some of Google's territory, the company has continued to innovate in areas that will make it an essential feature of our lives for many years to come. Techies have heard of many of their new products, but most marketers, and certainly the general public, are not yet aware of all the goodies coming out of beta from the search behemoth.
As a Google spokesperson told us, "The web is better when it is social, and people's experiences on the web become richer and more useful when social functionality is integrated in more places. We're always looking for ways to help people connect with each other and work together more efficiently in our own products and across the web." Translation: There's money to be made in connecting social behaviors to search, and Google's going to be there every step of the way.
Here are three of Google's latest projects:
- Google Wave. The first open source, real-time chat platform. It's part email, part IM, part collaboration tool, part search engine (it's Google after all!) that all happens in your browser in real time.
- Google Friend Connect. You've likely heard how important it is to add social elements to your website. But other than a link to Facebook and Twitter accounts, most of us can't spend the time or money to build a more comprehensive social component on our sites -- yet. However, Friend Connect lets sites add a "dash of social" just by copying a few bits of code. It's plug-and-play social.
- Google Latitude. The hope of location-based technology is that it will enable us to locate our friends' locations (when they allow this) and make the world a little smaller. You'll know when your friend is in the area and can meet for a coffee. For marketers, identifying location is key to delivering targeted messages in the right place and right time to the right customer. Google Latitude could be the gel location-based social has been waiting for.
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